What Can We Tell from These Temporal Measures? Temporal Measures as Indices of Oral Proficiency

Abstract

Oral English teaching has long been a weak link in the science universities in China, let alone the research on oral English test by quantitative method. Therefore, OEPT in the U.S. sheds enlightening light on the spoken English teaching and researching in China. OEPT (Oral English Proficiency Test) is a spoken English test aimed to assess the oral English proficiency of prospective international teaching assistants in the U.S. In the past few years, temporal variables as indices of oral English proficiency to analyze examinees’ oral speech were explored and studied at a large Mid-western American university. Based on the descriptive statistics of the selected temporal variables, this paper aims to give an interpretation of the figures obtained by OEPT data in order to get enlightening implications on spoken English teaching in China.